But judging from the unabashed promotion, further promotion, continuing promotion and continuing further promotion of the book on the Network 18 platform, it would seem as if James Joyce has returned to rework, well, Balika Vadhu.

# For days before the launch of the book on August 17, senior editors across Network 18 channels burnt the midnight oil sending off invitations (and reminders) to assemble a sizeable “power” audience.

# By a happy coincidence in April, Bahl received a nice little plug on CNN-IBN‘s breakfast show following his inclusion in a book by an Australian lawyer of corporate India’s bigwigs: “Raghav Bahl among top 30 Indian businessmen.”

# In May, Forbes ran a piece by Bahl titled 2050, An economic odyssey on how India and China would reclaim their positions as economic giants, with the author intro saying the book “is forthcoming from Penguin Allen Lane.”

# In July, Bahl took part in a discussion on Karan Thapar‘s CNBC show India Tonight, with Pranab Bardhan, whose book on the India-China theme ‘Awakening giants of clay‘ was published around the same, as co-panelist.

# In August, all the network’s channels carried the book’s grand launch in Delhi, with their websites carrying Bahl’s opening remarks and the panel discussion moderated by CNN-IBN editor-in-chief Rajdeep Sardesai.

# Promotional advertisements on the book have crawled on screens of the network’s channels for months now. On the group’s portal in.com, an anonymous guest posted a discussion urging readers to “Kindly promote this book in institutes“.

# The day after the launch, CNN-IBN declared on its website that “the book was drawing praise from the stalwarts of India Inc and the government,” with a 1-minute, 41-second news report even exhorting viewers to get their copy in “English or Hindi”.

# Readers of the September issue of Entrepreneur, published by Network 18, received a free 48-page booklet of Bahl’s book containing another “exclusive excerpt”.

# On the network’s Hindi business channel, CNBC Awaaz, Bahl featured in a debate with Congress and BJP leaders moderated by the channel’s editor, Sanjay Pugalia.

And the book has (so far) been reviewed by The Hindu, Businessworld, and India Today, and more are forthcoming.

Nevertheless, the issue at hand is one of Bahl, Network 18 and Superpower?.

The boilerplate excuse is, if an owner cannot push his own book on his own network, what use is his ownership? A good counter question is, would any other debutant author get so much play and promotion across so many media vehicles over so many months?

It can aslo be argued that Bahl is not the first media personality to use his baby is for self-promotion.

The Hindu routinely carries news items of its editor-in-chief N.Ram‘s speeches. The Times of India is full of promotions of its various “brands”, including pictures from Vineet Jain‘s annual Holi parties. India Today and Outlook routinely sneak in pictures of this or that group event on its pages.

Yet, there is such a thing as overdose when it involves the bossman. As a first-generation media mogul, Bahl might like to pick up a lesson from ToI‘s Samir Jain or Anand Bazar Patrika‘s Aveek Sarkar, both of whom maintain a very low profile in their publications.

You don’t need a Liebling to say what is obvious. And for the misuse of media space, just go back and see the number of broadsheet pages Hindustan Times and the Indian Express wasted to report the deaths of their owners G.D.Birla and Ramnath Goenka. Also the fiction (investigative reporting) that Arun Shourie manufactured at the behest of Goenka. Because they own their newspapers they treated their editors like janitors. These proprietors couldn’t wag their tails before editors like Durga Das, Khasa Subba Rao and Kotamraju Rama Rao because they were editors who valued self-respect more than anything else. P.Sainath has exposed what journalists are. It is not naivete but idiocy to believe that journalists are different from the tribe of luminaries that makes India a society of the corrupt. Indian media are a joint venture between that pompous body known as India.Inc. and aspiring media moghuls. We take their multi-edition national rags seriously because they have the negative potential of manufacturing consent.

The comparison with Aveek Sarkar of ABP and Samir Jain of Times of India does not hold. Raghav Bahl is the odd one out. Raghav is a journalist first and an entrepreneur later. As a journalist he craves for publicity, nothing surprising and only to be expected!